Episode 9: Emergency Management in Healthcare - Mary Mastroianni on Boston Children’s & Career Resilience
Mary Mastroianni, Senior Director of Emergency Management at Boston Children’s Hospital, has led her team through more than 200 hospital emergencies — from technology outages and infectious disease outbreaks to mass casualty events like the Boston Marathon bombing.
In this episode of Careers & Coffee Talk, Mary shares her career journey in hospital and pediatric emergency management, lessons on resilience and leadership, and advice for job seekers looking to break into healthcare emergency management careers.
You’ll hear:
☕ How trial-and-error shaped her path into emergency management
☕ What it’s like to lead emergency management at one of the nation’s top pediatric hospitals
☕ Lessons from the Boston Marathon bombing on resilience and leadership
☕ Her approach to hiring and mentoring the next generation of emergency managers
☕ Why passion for the mission — and a little extrovert energy — fuel her career
It’s a candid, inspiring conversation about matching passion, personality, and purpose with the right profession — and why emergency management in healthcare is one of the most rewarding and high-stakes career paths out there.
About Mary Mastroianni
Mary Devine Mastroianni, MPH is the Senior Director of Emergency Management for Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH). Within her role, she plans, administers, coordinates, and evaluates all activities of the Emergency Management Program. In this position, she develops measurable performance indicators to evaluate the hospital emergency response plans and mitigation strategies. During hospital emergencies, Mary acts as Planning Section Chief within the Hospital Incident Command System. At BCH alone, she has responded to over 200 hospital emergencies in the categories; technology, infrastructure, security, hospital surge, infectious disease and other safety events. During emergencies, she with her team writes and disseminate crisis and emergency risk communication materials to BCH Staff.
Mary also manages the mitigation process after the conclusion of these emergencies including the implementation and resolution of action plans developed from hospital debriefs. Regionally, Mary liaises with community agencies to develop multi-disciplinary emergency management responses on the local, regional and national levels. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she was an active member of the COVID-19 leadership team designing and implementing the hospital Command Center response. She has presented at over 15 conferences nationally regarding specific emergency management topics including pediatric emergency management, integration of HICS and technology downtimes, regional response to the Boston Marathon Bombing and coalition development.
Prior to working at BCH, Mary worked as the Emergency Management Coordinator for the Conference of Boston Teaching Hospitals. As the Emergency Management Coordinator, she coordinated between the 12 Boston Teaching Hospitals and response agencies such as fire, police, EMS and the Department of Public Health. In that role, she acted as the Healthcare Systems Branch Director for the Medical Intelligence Center during the Boston Marathon Bombing acting as the liaison between the Boston Hospitals and response agencies. During the bombing and the months following, she developed and implemented a patient tracking system for patients transported from the bombing site.
Other professional experience includes working at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. Mary has a BA from Saint Louis University and an MPH from Tulane University. She started her career in wildland firefighting.